Links - 15th June 2019 (2)

Calgary-area mom served with cease-and-desist letter after going public with classroom concerns - "A Calgary-area mother who spoke out to CBC News over concerns about a large combined Grade 2 class at Red Deer Lake School has been handed a cease-and-desist letter by a law firm on behalf of the school board... Colborne, who has another child attending the school, says parents have been trying to get answers from the school division for months, and she was surprised to receive the three-page cease-and-desist letter.Other parents have also received the letter and are not willing to be interviewed as a result... "Just the sheer image of a school board putting out cease-and-desist orders is pretty alarming""

CARONA CHICKEN: PAST AND PRESENT - "Carona’s Fried Chicken Wing Rice was founded in 1982 with a stall at the then Victoria Street Food Centre. Due to the popularity of their wings, the business name and recipe were then sold to a company that changed its name to Carona Chicken. Not only did they open their flagship Carona Marina Restaurant in 1992, they also started to franchise the brand, Carona Chicken. As a result, many Carona outlets began to mushroom islandwide, and this inevitably led to a significant drop in their standards. The eventual demise of the brand was also caused by both the shrinkage in serving portion as well as the increase in pricing... The good news is that the original recipe for Carona Fired Chicken Wings can still be found at 2 different stalls. The original owner of Carona’s Fried Chicken Wing Rice has started Victor’s Fried Chicken Wing Rice & Hainanese Chicken Rice. Two Wings is the other fancier stall selling Carona style fried chicken wing started by Jeremy, whose granduncle created the recipe."

Turkey election re-run angers victorious opposition - "Turkey's electoral body has been condemned for ordering Istanbul's local elections to be re-held after an opposition victory... The ruling party has since challenged the results in Ankara and Istanbul, which has prompted opposition accusations that they are trying to steal the election"

Nick Gillespie on Twitter - "I'm old enough to remember when Presidential Medals of Freedom were given for showing courage and making sacrifices on behalf of the nation and the world. Tiger Woods ... hits golf balls for money"
"Narrator voice: In fact, this is a sign that @paulkrugman is too old to remember things correctly anymore or even bother to look them up on @Wikipedia anymore. The medals go to wide range of recipients and @BarackObama alone gave 12 to athletes."

Singaporeans spend triple the time searching for property than reading their children bedtime stories or speaking to their parents: HSBC study – Business Insider Singapore - "Calling property a “national sport for Singaporeans”, HSBC said on Thursday (May 2) that its Beyond the Bricks 2019 survey found that Singaporeans spend 3.29 hours every week on property-related window shopping. That includes searching for property online and reading property magazines even when they are not looking to buy a new home.In comparison, the respondents spent just slightly more than an hour (1.03 hour) reading their children bedtime stories, and less than an hour (0.94 hour) talking to their parents every week... Slightly more than one-third (36 per cent) are impulsive and buy properties based purely on first impressions. This is lower than the global 39 per cent... When it comes to deciding if one should buy a property, 55 per cent of Singaporeans said that “creepy neighbours” are the biggest deal-breakers, higher than the global average of 47 per cent.As for superstition, only around 33 per cent considered bad feng shui and 16 per cent cited unlucky door numbers or street names as deal-breakers."

Meme - "Can Sex Doll Cook Your Meals?
Can Sex Doll Have Your Kids?
Can Sex Doll Wash Your Clothes?
Can Sex Doll Make Your Home?
What's It? You'll Are Really Triggered TBH Ain't No Sensible Man That Is Buying That Shit"
"So Cos of Sex Doll Y'all Women Suddenly Think It's a Woman's Duty to Cook Wash and Take Care of the Home?"

Average American worker takes less vacation than a medieval peasant - "Plowing and harvesting were backbreaking toil, but the peasant enjoyed anywhere from eight weeks to half the year off.The Church, mindful of how to keep a population from rebelling, enforced frequent mandatory holidays. Weddings, wakes, and births might mean a week off quaffing ale to celebrate, and when wandering jugglers or sporting events came to town, the peasant expected time off for entertainment... As for the modern American worker? After a year on the job, she gets an average of eight vacation days annually. It wasn't supposed to turn out this way: John Maynard Keynes, one of the founders of modern economics, made a famous prediction that by 2030, advanced societies would be wealthy enough that leisure time, rather than work, would characterize national lifestyles. So far, that forecast is not looking good... Some cite the victory of the modern eight-hour a day, 40-hour workweek over the punishing 70 or 80 hours a 19th century worker spent toiling as proof that we're moving in the right direction.But Americans have long since kissed the 40-hour workweek goodbye, and Shor's examination of work patterns reveals that the 19th century was an aberration in the history of human labor. When workers fought for the eight-hour workday, they weren't trying to get something radical and new, but rather to restore what their ancestors had enjoyed before industrial capitalists and the electric light bulb came on the scene... In addition to relaxing during long holidays, the medieval peasant took his sweet time eating meals, and the day often included time for an afternoon snooze... the Greeks, who face a horrible economy, work more hours than any other Europeans. In Germany, an economic powerhouse, workers rank second to last in number of hours worked. Despite more time off, German workers are the eighth most productive in Europe, while the long-toiling Greeks rank 24 out of 25 in productivity... Speaking of Congress, its members seem to be the only people in America getting as much down time as the medieval peasant. In recent years, they've gotten upward of 239 days in vacation time"

Why is my company skimping on my vacation? - "In Canada, the average vacation entitlement is over four weeks"

Vacation time taken by only one in three Canadians workers - "Most Canadians get two weeks’ vacation per year, perhaps more as they gain seniority, but only one in three actually takes it, according to a survey by the payroll management company, ADP Canada. Another 28 per cent report taking less than half of their allotted vacation time. “I think in Canada right now our relationship to work has become somewhat dysfunctional,” says Katrina Onstad, journalist and the author of The Weekend Effect. “We’re at a moment where being busy, being overworked and exhausted actually has a kind of cultural currency.“Our identities are really fused to work. It’s not uncommon at a party if you meet someone, the first question is ‘what do you do?’ It’s not ‘who are you?’... Those Canadians who are employed full time get less vacation than do their counterparts in Europe who average four to six weeks. This may be because the labour union movement is not as strong. Some who study the issue think it may have to do with Canada’s history and the pioneering spirit of the first Europeans who arrived and had to put work above play. Either way, Onstad thinks it is the interest of businesses to have their employees take vacations because the workers who do, for example those in Germany and Norway, are more productive and stay at their jobs longer. She also says there are health implications. “People who don’t take vacations are more prone to heart disease—both men and women—and also marital strife… There’s something that happens to our relationships if we don’t have time off to connect with one another"

Why taking vacation is important - "the average permanent, full-time Canadian worker received 17.3 vacation days in 2016, but only took 14. Interestingly, the study identified millennials as the demographic most likely to leave vacation days unused because they’re too busy at work. Given Millennials’ bad rap for being self-indulgent and work-shy, it’s an eye-opening statistic. The study also found that when Millennials do take vacations, they more likely check in frequently regardless of where they’re vacationing, thanks to the connectedness of email and mobile devices. Ontario and B.C. workers tied to take the fewest vacation days (just 14)... nearly 34% of managers discourage leave"

Sandra Bullock Hollywood News - Posts - [On Joan of Arc] "At first, Joan refused to answer questions about her revelations. But under the pressure of interrogation – and with a public stage on which to assert the truth of her mission – she began to speak of what she heard and saw. There was a light, she said, and a voice, that she had first heard when she was 13 in her father’s garden: the voice of an angel, sent by God.The questions went on: how did she know the voice was from God? Was it an angel, or a saint, or directly from God himself? Over hours and days, she parried and demurred – until at last she gave the detail her questioners seemed to require. She had heard and seen the archangel Michael – the patron saint of Armagnac France – and the virgin saints Margaret and Catherine.What she did not know, as she talked of their crowns, their faces, and the fact that they spoke French, was that she was condemning herself. Theologians – unlike Joan – were aware that, if she had truly seen saints and angels, she should prove it by describing their spiritual essence. The more she sought to make them ‘real’, with details she had never before described, the more she demonstrated to her accusers that this was a visitation not from heaven, but from hell. Unease over her claims about the nature of her voices was evident on her own side too during the later hearings to clear her name. “It is very difficult to reach a settled judgment in such matters,” was the inquiry’s briefest of conclusions on the subject in 1456. For all the talk of miracles, Charles VII was won over by victory in battle
How did a peasant girl persuade Charles VII to put her at the head of his army? All the evidence from 1429 suggests that Joan’s claims that she had been sent by God were a source of deep anxiety at the Armagnac court. If Charles were to put his faith in a false prophet, his kingdom of France would be lost forever. But if he rejected the words of a true prophet, the result would be equally disastrous."

PortableApps.com - Browse /Mozilla Firefox, Portable Ed./Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition 56.0.2 at SourceForge.net
This is the last Firefox version that supports the old addons

The Iraq War Was Not About Oil - "The situation is best summarized by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary S. Becker: “If oil were the driving force behind the Bush Administration’s hard line on Iraq, avoiding war would be the most appropriate policy.”... Given that Saudi Arabia (alongside all the other oil-rich Gulf states with the exception of Kuwait) opposed the war, invading Iraq risked future deals. Leading war proponent and U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was reported to be “more than pleased” that democracy in Iraq would make the Saudis uneasy and was supportive of “rocking the stability of tyrannies in the Arab world.” Such antagonism was antithetical to the interests of Shell and Exxon-Mobil who had made huge investments in the Kingdom’s natural gas... Both the Saudi monarchy and the Shah show that Big Oil’s profits are often better protected by a despotism that keeps its people down while passing on money to the West. If an appetite for Iraq’s oil fields was what drove U.S. policy then why not replace Saddam with a compliant strongman who could be controlled? Why insist on elections that would put the power to shape the Iraqi oil industry into the hands of the Iraqi people?After the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, no major oil company could even consider investing in Iraq. While an unstable underdeveloped country may hand over its resources to multinationals because it’s desperate for investment, the risk is that once a country recovers its government will reject what it sees as an unfair deal... Ultimately, the post-Saddam order, which gave birth to a thriving democracy and civil society, was a far cry from a playground for foreign oil companies or the “client state” resource colony Noam Chomsky accused the U.S. of invading Iraq to create... The biggest beneficiary of the post-war contracts has been China, emerging as the largest buyer of Iraqi oil in 2013... trying to claim that the U.S. or Britain in the 21st century is somehow colonial simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Despite the fact that Afghanistan is sitting on $1 trillion dollars worth of rare minerals, the young democracy has also been free to sign extraction agreements with China. Gaddafi already had dealings with BP, yet the West toppled the dictator despite the disruption it caused the company"

"Amoral masculinity": a theory for understanding Trump from feminist contrarian Christina Hoff Sommers - "In the past, activist students who disagreed with me came to my lectures to spar and debate.Today they issue trigger warnings and accuse me of giving them PTSD. At both Oberlin and Georgetown, activists organized safe spaces where students could flee if they were panicked by my arguments. At Oberlin, 35 students and a therapy dog sought refuge in a safe room... There is a lot of hostility toward men and toward women who don’t agree with them. There is a willingness, a readiness to censure, to silence people. It’s ironic because this is what feminists claim is being done to them... now the theory called intersectionality has taken over and it’s driving some of these tendencies in feminism, which are focused almost entirely on victim politics and paranoia, on conspiracy theories about how women are held back in the United States... Today, the women’s lobby deploys a faulty logic: In cases where men are better off than women, that’s injustice. Where women are doing better — that’s life... It is 2016. American women are among the best-informed and most self-determining human beings in the world. To say that they are manipulated into their life choices by forces beyond their control is divorced from reality and demeaning."

Nanny State Index | The best and worst countries to eat, drink, smoke & vape in the EU - "The Nanny State Index (NSI) is a league table of the worst places in the European Union to eat, drink, smoke and vape"

When students believed in liberty - "‘It was one of the great strengths of the Free Speech Movement’, says Bettina Aptheker, an FSM leader and now a professor of feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. ‘The only requirement was that they believed in the First Amendment – freedom of speech. That was it; we didn’t care what their politics were.'"
So much for Berkeley's Free Speech Movement not actually being about free speech, as some liberals claim